(Credits: Far Out)
Let’s play a game of music word association. If I said Britpop, you would most likely say Oasis. If I said soul, you might say Aretha Franklin. But if I said the 1960s, you would definitely say The Beatles.
They were the band of the decade, establishing the conventions of four-chord pop in the first half, before painting it with kaleidoscopic colour patterns and swirling textures in the second half. Throughout the decade, they set out the guidelines for several genres and achieved commercial chart success in the process. Everything that followed in the decades after and still to this day can be traced back to The Beatles and their influence.
Cynics are quick to claim that their impact on culture is somewhat overdone, but if you look at the landscape of music in the 1960s, it only continues to prove their genius. It was a different decade from the one that preceded it, one where Elvis Presley stood alone in a world of commercialised blues rock, but for The Beatles, their greatness existed in a far more fruitful world of music.
The Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, and Joni Mitchell were just a few of the artists releasing music in the same decade, yet somehow, The Beatles seemed to dominate it. They were the biggest-selling artists of the decade and scored the most number ones, leaving everyone else to compete for the scraps.
While they swept up most accolades, each would have to wait until the following decade to try to score solo artists’ records, for their career as a band was steadfast in the ‘60s. But even still, for any burgeoning solo artist hoping to penetrate the top of the charts in the ’60s, not only were their ambitions hampered by the ever-present brilliance of The Fab Four but also The King.
Despite coming up in the 1950s, Elvis Presley’s global stardom still meant he dominated the 1960s charts, becoming the biggest-selling solo artist of the decade, with a total of 131 million record sales.
While Aretha Franklin, Dusty Springfield, and Janis Joplin all wrote hits that have since become cultural classics, it was Barbara Streisand who topped the female solo charts in the 1960s. While her biggest-selling album and song didn’t come until 1980 with Guilty and its lead single ‘Woman In Love’, she released a mammoth 14 albums in the 1960s, including film soundtracks, which gave a nod to her cross-platform appeal and position as one of the world’s biggest entertainment stars.
What was the biggest-selling female album of the 1960s?
While Streisand’s position at the top of the charts benefited from her prolific output, it was also boosted by the individual sales of each album. Her 1964 record, People, went on to be the biggest-selling album by a female solo artist in the 1960s, selling over 150 million copies, with the record’s title track becoming one of her signature songs.
But the song wasn’t actually the biggest-selling track from a female solo artist in the 1960s. Unsurprisingly, that title is reserved for Aretha Franklin and her seminal hit ‘Respect’, with an approximate 3.5 million unit sales. But what’s more than that, Franklin’s tune became an anthem for a decade that, yes, celebrated a breadth of musical creativity but, more importantly, still tackled a dark and fractured societal underbelly.
Not only did ‘Respect’ break the commercial mould, but it helped soundtrack an upheaval of social revolution that defined the chapter in time.
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